Thoughts on books, reading and publishing from the staff and friends of the Tattered Cover Book Store.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Fresh Ink: Spotlight on Debut Books of All Kinds

A haunting literary drama, with a ripped-from-the headlines urgency reminiscent of Defending Jacob and Sue Miller's While I Was Gone, Golden State asks hard questions about the limits of loyalty and the bounds of family ties.

Growing up in the 1960s in one of California's most prominent political families, Natalie Askedahl worshipped her big brother, Bobby, a sensitive math prodigy who served as her protector and confidante. But after Bobby left home at sixteen on a Princeton scholarship, something changed between them. Now that Natalie is happily married, with a career and two young daughters, her only real regret is losing Bobby.

Then, a bomb explodes in the middle of her seemingly ideal life. Her oldest daughter is on the Stanford campus when one person is killed and another maimed. Other bombings follow across California. Frightened for her family, Natalie grows obsessed with the case until she makes an unthinkable discovery: the bomber's manifesto reads alarmingly like the last letter she has from Bobby.

Unsure of whom to sacrifice and whom to protect, Natalie is confronted with a terrible choice that will send her down a rabbit hole of confusion, lies, and betrayals. As her life splits irrevocably into before and after, she begins to learn that some of the most dangerous things in the world are the stories we tell ourselves.

Praise for the book:
“Kegan’s masterful, stirring portrait of familial lover aises moral
questions that’ll have you twisting in your seat, asking yourself,'What
would I do?'" ~Will Allison,author of Long
Drive Home

“In prose more readable and brisk and light-filled
than any I’ve read in a long time, Stephanie Kegan has created an
intimate portrait of a woman whose lifelong love of her big brother
can’t be compromised even by his monstrous crimes. Golden Stateis
a moral story of the supremacy of love over law, rendered moving by the
tenderness of the ordinary domestic day-to-day life wherein these
atrocities come to be revealed.” ~Louis B. Jones, author of Particles and Luck

“Stephanie Kegan’s Golden State signals the
arrival of an exciting new voice in contemporary American fiction. Here
is a California novel like no other, where an influential family’s
turbulent legacy, and one woman’s decision, ultimately shapes the
destiny of an entire state. In a landscape that is at once as serene and
Edenic as it is volatile and combustible, Kegan’s writing is deft,
finely calibrated, and emotionally resonant. With a cast of characters
that feel so familiar they could be our own kin, nothing is spared here
as we witness the lengths Natalie Askedahl—wife, mother, sister—will go
to in order to protect the ones she loves most." ~Alex Espinoza, author
of Still Water Saints